Gregory D. Evans / LIGATT Twitter Plagiarism

on May 24 22:56:34 CDT 2010

attrition.org

ATLANTA, GA-May 5, 2010 . LIGATT Security International, (OTC: LGTT) a cyber security company, announced the launch of their first social media campaign that will inform their followers on how
to become a computer hacker in 15 minutes. The concept of this campaign is to educate LSI's followers how to think like a computer hacker.

Beginning May 12, 2010 LIGATT Security will began to tweet daily tips on how a person can hack into an individual's wireless network. How to Become a Hacker in 15 minutes is a series of security
applications prepared by the world's no. 1 Hacker, Gregory Evans. This short training course displays how a hacker can find anyone by their email address, and how to hack into a personal computer to
steal an individuals' personal information.

The twitter messages will include step-by-step instructions on how to become a computer hacker so that LSI's twitter followers will be able to protect their wireless networks from being hacked.

The first 'lesson' on "how to become a hacker" and second 'lesson' on "footprinting" were insipid and a far cry from
teaching anyone to be a hacker, especially in 15 minutes. However, as the third 'lesson' rolled around covering 'scanning',
the tweets quickly became suspect. After a couple Google searches, it was easily confirmed that LIGATT is simply copying
most material directly from The CEH Prep Guide:
The Comprehensive Guide to Certified Ethical Hacking. This constitutes outright plagiarism for most of the tweets.

For some of the tweets, the line between paraphrasing and plagiarism is blurry. According to the California State University
Library guide on How to Avoid Plagiarism,
there are two key points in determining if a piece of work is plagiarized or paraphrased. The first is that paraphrased material
must be credited. LIGATT did not credit the source of their 'hacker' tweets in the initial press release or via Twitter at any
point. While we have marked some tweets as "not plagiarized" below, in reality several are.

When considering if LIGATT's tweets are plagiarized versus paraphrased, CSU's guide on "Unacceptable Paraphrase" was used:

Unacceptable paraphrase is usually caused by making only superficial changes to the original text such as replacing some of the words with synonyms or changing the sentence order. The
paraphrase is so close to the original that it is considered essentially a direct quote without attribution. Unacceptable paraphrase, particularly close paraphrase, usually shows the student does not have
a significant understanding of the subject and opens the possibility of misrepresenting the original author's ideas.

Based on that outline, attrition.org feels that some of the tweets would be characterized as paraphrasing, if they were properly
credited.

Moving forward, we wonder if Chris Sweigart of WXIA 11Alive News in Atlanta will do a follow-up piece to his
three paragraph puff piece about the LIGATT
Twitter stunt.

UPDATE: On May 24, this article was published demonstrating the blatant plagiarism by Evans. The material
included in Lesson 1 through 3 included below were included. We assumed that exposing this
activity would prompt LIGATT and Evans to quit the 'campaign', or at the very least quit
plagiarizing. Instead, he waited three days and resumed the 'learn to hack' Twitter campaign,
and continued to plagiarize from the same source primarily.

Lesson 4: Hacking Techniques

Plagiarism?

@LIGATT Tweet

Source

Source Quote

service set identifier is an I.D. value programmed in the access point to identify the local wireless subnet.

Since it's often time-consuming and tedious to ping every possible address individually, a technique known as a ping sweep can be performed that will ping a batch of devices
and help the attacker determine which ones are active.

Before starting the scanning phase, you will need to identify active target machines. Ping can be used for this task.